Up until this point, we have been discussing pricing as a one-sided equation of how much I as an artist need to get, to pay for whatever my lifestyle or other financial requirements are. But sales are never just a one-sided discussion — a deal always has to have two sides.

And while of course it’s imperative to find a good place to set-up our side of the equation (meaning we don’t sell our work for bread crumbs, and are consistent in our pricing structure), there is an equally important part that a lot of us may not give too much thought to, but is imperative that we understand.

The customer.

The best ideas sometimes fail because those that have these ideas fail to think about their customers. That’s why designers are taught to always start with needs, not products; a fine balance of both is obviously the best, but it’s extremely hard to get it right.

To look at the well-known Apple MacBook and it’s evolution throughout the years, it always started with the needs of the customer in mind; an easy to use system, a flawless, frictionless extension of ones self — that was the goal. 

But the more Apple began to slowly glorify the MacBook as a “beautiful, slick product”, the less the machine was able to actually serve the needs of those that used it. It became thinner and thinner to the point where thinness wasn’t a functional means of making people’s lives and usage of the product easier, but a status symbol in itself.

The same goes for the keyboard; one of the 3 main ways I interact with my computer is the keyboard, and to make it thin and mushy and “something people need to get used to”, solely because the machine itself is now so thin that it can compete with kitchen knives as much as it does with other laptops, that’s a bad move and it shows in the dropping numbers of users and customers that Apple has been encountering for a while now.

Ok, no more laptops! This is an art blog after all.

My point is: Any product we make is located on various spectrums — one of them is utilitarian functionalism vs. utopian idealism. Simply put, does it serve a purpose or is it only meant to be experienced as a pure idea (useless but beyond immaculate in its values).

Art is quite on the immaculate extreme — especially fine art, that serves the higher needs of self-actualisation and can hold ideologies, but I’d like to stay clear of these for a while so that we have time to first figure out what the hell is utilitarian about a pretty flower painting when compared to a real flower (preferably an edible one) that we can actually use.

Because if we wish to be able to understand what our customers and collectors want, we first have to figure out what they need. And as with all expert professions, we, who try to service such particular needs will encounter a lot of people where they themselves don’t exactly know what they need — but when confronted with the right solution, their problem they had almost instantly becomes clear.

So it is not only our job (and as such the value that we provide to society) to be able to make a good product on the merit of mere technical execution — anyone can learn to draw a portrait through instructions; most can learn to draw them excellently even without guidance by the customer, but to be able to capture the character and “spirit” of the portrayed so that the finished product looks like a permanent snapshot of their being and not just a pretty drawing, that’s where real art begins to happen. 

All of us should aim at getting our work to the point where the commissioner says: “I never thought about that, but now that I see it, I get why it’s important.”

Our main job — if the artistic profession is indeed what we are aiming for (and there’s a reason why it’s called a profession at this level) — is to immerse ourselves into the minds and hearts of our customers and collectors, and hone not only our technical skill, but our ability to solve problems that people didn’t even know exist, let alone trouble them.

The point is though — unlike any other profession that would fail 99% of the time, if confronted with such a task — the arts (so not just visual art, but all the arts) do not need to invent new things, they do not need to beta test and innovate; all we have to do is learn about what makes people tick and what their problems are and create an experience that allows them to learn, grow and understand them and eventually overcome them or remind them of the previous victories they already have achieved.